[ Procurement: Then vs Now and War vs Peace ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a look at another question
from one of the fantastic Forgotten Weapons Patreon supporters.
Today it is Charles who says, "I'd love to hear you do a deep dive
on the commissioning and procurement process of the Chauchat
compared to the FAMAS or the HK416F."
Or the Sten versus the L85, or the Papasha 41 versus the AK-12 etc.
The specific question I have is, "Why does defence procurement take so much longer
and cost so much more today than it did in the first half of the 20th century
when national defence was a far more pressing concern."
Well Charles, I think there's actually a misunderstanding
or an incorrect assumption built into the foundation of the question.
Because the trials and commissioning process for military small arms 100 years ago
was in fact an extremely expensive and time-consuming process.
In fact in many ways 100 years ago
the procurement trials were actually more complex than they are today.
One of the interesting things about trials 100 years ago
is first off there were a lot of different companies that would often submit guns.
And in a lot of cases (for the United States in particular),
they weren't limiting submissions to these trials to
just companies that could actually build the guns.
So today, if we want to replace for example the M4,
... submissions are going to come from gun factories.
FN maybe will submit a gun, Textron will submit a gun
(not a gun factory, but they could produce some stuff), SIG will submit a gun.
These are companies that have a design, and they can build that design and mass produce it.
Well, 100 years ago it was pretty common for inventors to submit
like literally one-off examples of ... a gun that they designed,
that they'd built, that they thought would fit the army requirements.
And you can see this in some of the early breech-loading rifle trials
for the British and for the Americans as well.
There will be dozens, sometimes more than 100,
different submissions to government requests for a new weapon.
Because, like I as an individual can hammer one out in my own workshop
and submit it to the army, and maybe it'll work out.
And if it does, the ... nation has its own government-run arsenals that will be producing it.
So countries weren't always concerned about whether a submission to a small arms program
was actually being submitted by someone who ... owned a factory that could make it.
It didn't matter, we find the gun that we want, and then we'll make it ourselves.
Royal Small Arms Factory Enfield, Springfield Armoury,
the different countries that have their own national gun factories.
Today that's really not a thing anywhere,
every country is essentially relying on private industry to supply firearms.
In addition with ye olde firearms trials, they had
basically all the same sort of trials that they put each gun through that we do today.
You'll see endurance trials, many, many thousands of rounds through the guns.
You'll see things like salt water exposure trials.
In some cases trials that are rather more severe than we even do today,
like, "We're going to soak this gun in a barrel of sal ammoniac acid overnight.
And then we're going to leave it out in the rain for a week,
and then we're going to try shooting it and see what happens."
Like yeah, not surprisingly most of the guns they put [through that] turned into rusty disasters.
But mud tests, sand tests, water tests, rain tests.
All the stuff that you see people doing today was done back 100 years ago.
Now the examples that you gave ... have a different thing in common,
and that is the difference between small arms procurement during a conflict
and small arms procurement during peacetime, and that's where the big difference is.
So the Chauchat for example, since you brought it up,
the Chauchat was initially designed as basically an aircraft machine gun.
It didn't have a bipod, it didn't have a sling, it was mounted on an airplane.
Which by the way, is part of the reason the open-sided magazine didn't matter.
Part of the reason that its ... capability to like lock up after extended fire, that didn't matter
because the gun couldn't get hot because it was mounted on an airplane flying around in very cold air.
Anyway, the Chauchat went through a development process ... before World War One,
and then kind of it got sat on the side line, it was never that important of a gun.
Until 1915 when the French realised,
"We absolutely need automatic rifles, like we've got to have a lot of automatic rifles to give to guys.
This is a ... type of firearm that we didn't think was important before the war,
and now, now that we've been in a war for a little while,
we're realising that, holy cow, this is a really important thing that we need."
Very similar in fact to the British rationale for the Sten gun.
Before World War Two the British don't really see the submachine gun
as a particularly relevant or important type of weapon.
You'll see it around, they sometimes look down their noses
at those "gangster guns", in particular Thompsons.
And then the Germans go blitzkrieging through Europe using a whole lot of submachine guns,
and the British, "Blimey, we could really use some of those."
And then they developed the Sten gun.
So the thing about procurement during wartime, and maybe this is obvious
but it's worth pointing out, it's worth putting down,
is the standards get a bit relaxed during wartime.
When there is an immediate need for a specific firearm the procurement process becomes,
"What do we have, and what will actually fulfil the specific need that we see right now."
Whereas during peacetime the procurement process is more along the lines of,
"What can be developed, and what will best fit our needs?"
With a lot of contingencies, like maybe we want something
that's going to be multi-purpose and do a bunch of things.
You get into wartime and actual fighting really clarifies a lot of situations,
and it becomes, "This is the specific role that I need this thing to make.
I need an automatic rifle. I need a submachine gun."
And the exact details are less important than,
"Will this be a submachine gun that I can have a whole lot of real fast?"
And that's sort of the situation where both the Sten and the Chauchat were developed.
... In the case of the Chauchat this was a gun that was close,
like the CS machine rifle as it was called at that time, Chauchat Sutter,
was the closest thing the French had to an in-production automatic rifle.
It was meant for aircraft but with a little bit of modification,
you flip the action upside down, you put a bipod on it,
and OK, you can have an automatic rifle.
And because it was better than anything else
that was available in fairly short order, that's what they put into production.
And the same with the Sten gun. The Sten wasn't in development before the war,
but the Sten was the result of a design
that was developed very quickly that could be produced very quickly.
Like, "OK, we need a submachine gun, what can we do? Let's sketch out some stuff
on a bar napkin, and yeah that'll work, let's do it."
Now the ... upside is it saves a lot of time because you're not doing some of the testing.
There is always testing to make sure that the design works,
that the production meets the specifications.
But you're not doing a lot of comparative testing.
And there's not a lot of "what ifs" that are considered.
It's just, "Here's the basic role, will this fire 5,000 rounds?"
"Yes." "OK good, move it along in the process."
And as a result you overlook a lot of things.
And often that doesn't matter during the war,
because it's more important to get that gun into service.
But after the war you look at it and you realise,
"Wow, we could have done ... like there's so many problems with this gun."
Does this sound familiar? Does this sound like characteristics of the Chauchat and the Sten gun both?
They were what was needed right then, but didn't last so well after the war.
The French abandoned the Chauchat very quickly,
and gave a whole bunch of them away to everybody who really didn't have any choice
but to accept charitable donations of surplus firearms.
The British revised the Sten gun into the Mark V, which was actually decent.
And then replaced it fairly quickly with the Sterlings.
Again, giving Sten guns to everybody who
really couldn't afford to pay for anything that was better.
The Papasha 41 versus AK-12 is a little bit of a different situation going on.
Obviously the AK-12, I'll leave it to everyone else who's already looked at the AK-12
to talk about what went wrong in the development process there.
But Russian military procurement is notably corrupt
and leads to results like the AK-12 from time to time.
The Papasha 41 is actually a gun that was in development before the invasion of Russia.
It was a gun that was specifically being designed to be inexpensive to manufacture.
And so it did actually go through a lot of development.
It went through competitive trials ... with a couple of their competitive machine guns.
And it was chosen, and then was refined into a bit of an even simpler design to make.
So, the Papasha doesn't quite fall into ... the same category
of ... emergency procurement during wartime.
That would be more like emergency simplification and production during wartime.
But the Sten and the FAMAS I think are both outstanding examples of the trade-off
between, "I need it right now ... and I'm willing to accept
that there are going to be some shortcomings and some problems
that we're not going to take the time to fix."
The L85 ... actually in some ways has some of the same sort of problems as the AK-12.
It was a ... terribly run development program for the L85
largely because of bureaucratic overhead.
The FAMAS actually is a pretty good example of a typical peacetime development program.
It took about ... 8 or 10 years.
The rifle was developed from some basic requirement principles.
And slowly iterated, getting better and better and better
as the development progressed until they have a final version.
They start putting it into production and then, as is kind of typical, they go,
"Oh crap, there were a couple of last minute things we need to change
like, oh, let's throw in a burst mechanism."
And then the gun goes into production, and didn't really have any
hugely substantial problems once it did get into production.
And it stayed in service for several decades, so.
The L85 is similar once you get past all of the fixing that they had to do to it.
The 416 kind of similar, it didn't take quite as long
because it was a gun that was already in commercial production
instead of something that was developed specifically for the French military from the ground up, but.
Anyway, now I'm just rambling. So hopefully this did a decent job of answering your question.
We will continue to do a couple of questions like this each week.
If you are interested in having your question answered,
you are encouraged to sign up on Patreon or Utreon.
And I have threads running on both of those platforms
where you can submit questions to be answered in a format like this.
Thank you very much for watching.